Andreessen Venture Funds Succeed Modestly

In an Andrew Ross Sorkin column, Sean Parker urged successful entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, rather than to semi-retire as venture capitalists. In that column, Marc Andreessen was quoted as sympathizing with Parker’s view.

(p. A1) Andreessen Horowitz’s first three venture funds have nearly doubled their investment capital or better since inception, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that provide a rare look at the performance of one of Silicon Valley’s top venture-capital firms.
But an analysis of its returns, compared with funds from top rivals and industry averages, shows that Andreessen Horowitz hasn’t yet earned its reputation as an elite firm.
The firm, co-founded by web pioneer Marc Andreessen in 2009, is routinely mentioned among the pantheon of great startup investors with the likes of Sequoia Capital, a status that has allowed it to command higher fees than some of its peers.
Sequoia has separated itself from the pack thanks to its consistently high returns. Its 2003 and 2006 venture funds have both risen eightfold net of fees, according to a person familiar with the matter.
. . .
(p. A2) Venture-capital firms raise money from universities, pension funds and other institutions to wager on startups. They typically raise a new fund every few years, operating a handful at the same time with each expected to wind down after 10 years.
Though they fall short of their top-notch rivals, all three Andreessen Horowitz funds–whose bets include Instagram, Airbnb and Pinterest Inc.–have outperformed the average of venture funds raised in the same years, according to benchmark data from investment adviser Cambridge Associates. The earliest fund, raised in 2009, ranks in the top 5% of venture funds from that year; the second fund, raised in 2010, ranks in the top 50%; and the third from 2012 ranks in the top 25%.

For the full story, see:
Winkler, Rolfe. “Andreessen’s Venture Firm Trails Rivals.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Sept. 2, 2016): A1-A2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Sept. 1, 2016, and had the title “Andreessen Horowitz’s Returns Trail Venture-Capital Elite.”)

The views of Sean Parker and Marc Andreessen on venture capital, that I mention at the top, are summarized in:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “Dealbook; Taking a Risk, and Hoping That Lightning Strikes Twice.” The New York Times (Tues., July 24, 2012): B1 & B4.

Traveling Health Volunteers Often Do Harm

(p. D3) Tens of thousands of religious and secular institutions now send hundreds of thousands of health volunteers from the United States out into the world, generating close to an estimated $1 billion worth of unpaid labor. Volunteers include experienced medical professionals and individuals who can provide only elbow grease; between these extremes of competence are the hordes of students in the health professions, among whom global volunteering has become immensely popular.
. . .
Students may take advantage of the circumstances to attempt tasks well beyond their expertise. Seasoned professionals may cling to standards of practice that are irrelevant or impossible to sustain in poor countries. Unskilled volunteers who do not speak the language may monopolize local personnel with their interpreting needs without providing much of value in return.
Problems may lie with the structure of a program rather than the personnel. Volunteer projects may be choppy and discontinuous, one set of volunteers not knowing what the previous group was up to, and not able to leave suggestions for the next group. Medications may run out. Surgery may be performed with insufficient provisions for postoperative care.
Even well-organized programs may undermine hosting communities in unanticipated ways: For instance, a good volunteer-based clinic may sap confidence in local medical care and, providing free services, threaten to put local physicians out of business.
. . .
A few studies on the long-term effects of short-term good works are ongoing. In the meantime, “there is little evidence that short-term volunteer trips produce the kinds of transformational changes that are often promised,” Dr. Lasker finds.

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “The Folly of the Well-Meaning Traveling Volunteer.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 26, 2016): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 25, 2016, and has the title “Books; Book Review: ‘Hoping to Help’ Questions Value of Volunteers.”)

The book under review, is:
Lasker, Judith N. Hoping to Help: The Promises and Pitfalls of Global Health Volunteering, The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016.

Feds Use Taxpayer Money to Buy $20 Million of Cheese

(p. C1) U.S. agricultural officials agreed to purchase $20 million of cheese products from struggling dairy farmers who pleaded for a bailout earlier this month.
Around 11 million pounds of food will be donated to families throughout the country through government nutrition-assistance programs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.
. . .
The national Milk Producers Federation, a group of roughly 30,000 farmers, on Aug. 12 asked the agency to purchase a much as $150 million of cheese, as a glut of dairy products and other food commodities has sent prices for many farmers to the lowest levels in years.

For the full story, see:
Gee, Kelsy. “U.S. Says Cheese–to Aid Farmers.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Aug. 25, 2016): C1.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: after much searching on 9/10/16, I could not find an online version of the story on the WSJ site.)

Colorful Coral Reef Is Thriving in Hot Water

(p. D1) In 2003, researchers declared Coral Castles dead.
On the floor of a remote island lagoon halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the giant reef site had been devastated by unusually warm water. Its remains looked like a pile of drab dinner plates tossed into the sea. Research dives in 2009 and 2012 had shown little improvement in the coral colonies.
Then in 2015, a team of marine biologists was stunned and overjoyed to find Coral Castles, genus Acropora, once again teeming with life. But the rebound came with a big question: Could the enormous and presumably still fragile coral survive what would be the hottest year on record?
This month, the Massachusetts-based research team finished a new exploration of the reefs in the secluded Phoenix Islands, a tiny Pacific archipelago, and were thrilled by what they saw. When they splashed out of an inflatable dinghy to examine Coral Castles closely, they were greeted with a vista of bright greens and purples — unmistakable signs of life.
“Everything looked just magnificent,” said Jan Witting, the expedition’s chief scientist and a researcher at Sea Education Association, based in Woods Hole, Mass.
. . .
(p. D6) If Coral Castles can continue to revive after years of apparent lifelessness, even as water temperatures rise, there might be hope for other reefs with similar damage, said another team member, Randi Rotjan, a research scientist who led and tracked the Phoenix Islands expedition from her base at the New England Aquarium in Boston.
No one actually knows what drives reef resilience or even what a coral reef looks like as it is rebounding. In remote, hard-to-get-to places, our understanding of coral is roughly akin to a doctor’s knowing only what a patient looks like in perfect health and after death, Dr. Rotjan said.

For the full story, see:
KAREN WEINTRAUB. “In Splash of Colors, Signs of Hope for Coral Reefs.” The New York Times (Tues., AUG. 16, 2016): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 15, 2016, and has the title “Giant Coral Reef in Protected Area Shows New Signs of Life.” The print version gave incorrect affiliation for Jan Witting. The version above is the online version.)

FDA Blocking Stem-Cell Therapies from Those With No Other Hope

(p. D2) Research is exploding into ways stem cells might be harnessed to cure diseases, mend damaged tissue, even grow replacement organs.
. . .
Jeffrey Weiss, a retinal surgeon in Margate, Fla., has treated about 570 patients with retinal and optic nerve diseases with stem cells taken from patients’ bone marrow as part of a study, and says that about 60% have had meaningful improvement. Patients pay $19,000 to $21,000 to receive the injections.
Shawn Rockafellow, a 31-year old truck dispatcher in Chandler, Ariz., started rapidly losing his vision in 2014 to a genetic disease and says he was told to accept that he was going blind. His mother read about Dr. Weiss’s work. Mr. Rockafellow raised the $20,000 fee on GoFundMe, a personal charity website, and had the treatment in both eyes in January.
After three months, the vision in his right eye went from roughly 20/1,000 to 20/400. After six months, it was 20/300. His left eye hasn’t improved as much, so he wants to try the treatment again. His regular ophthalmologist, Scott Markham, says “the fact that he’s not worsening is fantastic.”
. . .
Mark Berman, a Beverly Hills, Calif., cosmetic surgeon who co-founded a network of stem-cell clinics, says “fundamentally, all we are doing is a simple, surgical procedure. This is not witch-doctor stuff. We are repairing cell damage with people’s own stem cells.” He says the member clinics in 25 states have treated about 5,000 patients to date, with no significant adverse events.
SammyJo Wilkinson, a former dot-com executive, developed multiple sclerosis in 1995 and was confined to a wheelchair by 2011. She says her symptoms started to improve almost immediately after receiving a high-dose stem cell treatment at a Houston clinic in 2012. When the FDA blocked access to that form of therapy, Ms. Wilkinson went to Cancún, Mexico, for follow-ups. After a total of five treatments for $90,000, she says she has far less pain, can exercise and walk short distances with the help of a walker.
At the FDA hearing, Ms. Wilkinson, who founded a patient group called Patients for Stem Cells, plans to appeal for a faster approval process for stem-cell therapies and a registry to monitor patient outcomes. “Patients will never get these treatments if they have to go the traditional double-blind placebo-controlled trial route. That takes 10 years and $1 billion,” she says. “There’s got to be a middle ground, where you don’t shut off treatment, you just keep track of it.”

For the full story, see:
Beck, Melinda. “Stem-Cell Treatments Become More Available, and Face More Scrutiny.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Aug. 30, 2016): D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 29, 2016, and has the title “Stem-Cell Treatments Become More Available, and Face More Scrutiny.” There are minor differences in wording between the online and print versions. The sentences quoted above, follow the online version.)

“Practice Makes Perfect, but It Doesn’t Make New”

(p. 12) Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
. . .
In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. “Those who do must make a painful transition” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”
Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves.

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “How to Raise a Creative Child.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JAN. 31, 2016): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 16, 2016, and has the title “How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.”)

Grant’s commentary is related to his book:
Grant, Adam. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. New York: Viking, 2016.

College Admissions Process Encourages Superficial Service

(p. 3) This summer, as last, Dylan Hernandez, 17, noticed a theme on the social media accounts of fellow students at his private Catholic high school in Flint, Mich.
“An awfully large percentage of my friends — skewing towards the affluent — are taking ‘mission trips’ to Central America and Africa,” he wrote to me in a recent email. He knows this from pictures they post on Snapchat and Instagram, typically showing one of them “with some poor brown child aged 2 to 6 on their knee,” he explained. The captions tend to say something along the lines of, “This cutie made it so hard to leave.”
But leave they do, after as little as a week of helping to repair some village’s crumbling school or library, to return to their comfortable homes and quite possibly write a college-application essay about how transformed they are.
. . .
Hernandez reached out to me because he was familiar with writing I had done about the college admissions process. What he described is something that has long bothered me and other critics of that process: the persistent vogue among secondary-school students for so-called service that’s sometimes about little more than a faraway adventure and a few lines or paragraphs on their applications to selective colleges.
It turns developing-world hardship into a prose-ready opportunity for growth, empathy into an extracurricular activity.
And it reflects a broader gaming of the admissions process that concerns me just as much, because of its potential to create strange habits and values in the students who go through it, telling them that success is a matter of superficial packaging and checking off the right boxes at the right time. That’s true only in some cases, and hardly the recipe for a life well lived.
. . .
Richard Weissbourd, a child psychologist and Harvard lecturer who has studied the admissions process in the interest of reforming it, recalled speaking with wealthy parents who had bought an orphanage in Botswana so their children could have a project to write and talk about. He later became aware of other parents who had bought an AIDS clinic in a similarly poor country for the same reason.
“It becomes contagious,” he said.
A more recent phenomenon is teenagers trying to demonstrate their leadership skills in addition to their compassion by starting their own fledgling nonprofit groups rather than contributing to ones that already exist — and that might be more practiced and efficient at what they do.
. . .
In many cases they are compelled. Tara Dowling, the director of college counseling at the Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, R.I., said that many secondary schools (including, as it happens, Dylan Hernandez’s) now require a minimum number of hours of service from students, whose schedules — jammed with sports, arts, SAT prep and more — leave little time for it.
Getting it done in one big Central American swoop becomes irresistible, and if that dilutes the intended meaning of the activity, who’s to blame: the students or the adults who set it up this way?

For the full commentary, see:
Bruni, Frank. “To Get to Harvard, Go to Haiti?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 14, 2016): 3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 13, 2016.)

Precautionary Principle Slows Cloning Innovation

(p. A8) Dolly the Sheep started her life in a test tube in 1996 and died just six years later. When she was only a year old, there was evidence that she might have been physically older. At five, she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis. And at six, a CT scan revealed tumors growing in her lungs, likely the result of an incurable infectious disease. Rather than let Dolly suffer, the vets put her to rest.
Poor Dolly never stood a chance. Or did she?
Meet Daisy, Diana, Debbie and Denise. “They’re old ladies. They’re very healthy for their age,” said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist who, with his colleagues at the University of Nottingham in Britain, has answered a longstanding question about whether cloned animals like Dolly age prematurely.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, the scientists tested these four sheep, created from the same cell line as Dolly, and nine other cloned sheep, finding that, contrary to popular belief, cloned animals appear to age normally.
. . .
Not only did many countries, including Canada and Australia, ban reproductive cloning in animals, but the United Nations banned all kinds of cloning in humans in 2005. Last year the European Union made importing food from cloned animals or their offspring illegal.
. . .
Now, based on results of this new study, researchers have confirmed what most scientists believed years ago: Cloning does not lead to premature aging.
. . .
Many scientists hope that changes in perception will lead to advances in reproductive technology that will enable us to provide food for a growing global population, save endangered species and develop advanced therapies.

For the full story, see:
JOANNA KLEIN. “Dolly’s Fellow Clones, Enjoying the Golden Years.” The New York Times (Weds., JULY 27, 2016): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 26, 2016, and has the title “Dolly the Sheep’s Fellow Clones, Enjoying Their Golden Years.”)

When Minimum Wage Rises, So Does Crime

(p. A13) By significantly reducing the available stock of job opportunities at the bottom end of the career ladder, a higher minimum wage increases the likelihood that unemployed teens will seek income elsewhere. A 2013 study by economists at Boston College analyzed increases in state and federal minimum-wage levels between 1997 and 2010. It found that low-skill workers affected by minimum-wage hikes were more likely to lose their jobs, become idle and commit crime. The authors warn that their results “point to the dangers both to the individual and to society from policies that restrict the already limited employment options of this group.”

For the full commentary, see:
MARK J. PERRY and MICHAEL SALTSMAN. “The Fight for $15 Will Hit North Philly Hard; Not far from Democrats’ soiree, teen unemployment is at 42%. What if the minimum wage doubles?” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 27, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 26, 2016.)

The 2013 study by Boston College economists, mentioned above, was published in 2014. The published version is:
Beauchamp, Andrew, and Stacey Chan. “The Minimum Wage and Crime.” B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 14, no. 3 (July 2014): 1213-35.

American Indians Suffer from Lack of Property Rights

(p. A15) There are almost no private businesses or entrepreneurs on Indian reservations because there are no property rights. Reservation land is held in trust by the federal government and most is also owned communally by the tribe. It’s almost impossible for tribe members to get a mortgage, let alone borrow against their property to start a business. The Bureau of Indian Affairs regulates just about every aspect of commerce on reservations.
Instead of giving Indians more control over their own land–allowing them to develop natural resources or use land as collateral to start businesses–the federal government has offered them what you might call a loophole economy. Washington carves out a sector of the economy, giving tribes a regulatory or tax advantage over non-Indians. But within a few years the government takes it away, in many cases leaving Indian tribes as impoverished and more disheartened than they were before.
. . .
What American Indians need first is less regulation. There is a reason that Native Americans say BIA, the initials for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, really stands for “Bossing Indians Around.”

For the full commentary, see:
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY. “The Loophole Economy Is No Jackpot for Indians; Running casinos or selling tax-free cigarettes can’t substitute for what tribes truly need: property rights.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 27, 2016.)

The above commentary by Riley is related to her book, which is:
Riley, Naomi Schaefer. The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians. New York: Encounter Books, 2016.

RFID Tags Can Enable Process Innovations

(p. A11) The numbers don’t look good: Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that worker productivity dropped 0.5% in the second quarter of 2016–the third quarterly decline in a row. Productivity growth, a key driver of improved living standards, has averaged only 1.3% a year over the past decade, compared with 2.9% from mid-1995 through the end of 2005.
Why the slowdown? One theory is that markets have already wrung the easy efficiencies out of current technology. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen noted in June that some economists “believe that the low-hanging fruit of innovation largely has been picked and that there is simply less scope for further gains.”
Count me in the optimistic camp. Low-cost wireless technologies are only beginning to break down the wall between the physical and digital worlds, and early-adopting companies are already achieving astounding productivity gains.
. . .
Employees can take inventory by waving an RFID reader over a shelf or a rack. A 2009 study by the University of Arkansas found scanning 10,000 items took 53 hours using bar codes, but only two hours with RFID. That efficiency allows Macy’s to inventory items every month rather than once or twice annually. Pam Sweeney, Macy’s senior vice president of logistics systems, tells me that RFID has pushed inventory accuracy in these departments to 95%.
. . .
As the cost of RFID tags falls to only cents apiece, the applications widen. Imagine checking out at the grocery store one day simply by running your cart through a scanner in a few seconds–no bar codes required. How many hours a year would that save consumers and employees both? If you want a million minuscule reasons to be bullish about productivity, look no further than tiny RFID tags.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK ROBERTI. “How Tiny Wireless Tech Makes Workers More Productive; Macy’s and Delta are using cheap RFID tags to blend the physical and digital.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 17, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 16, 2016.)